Damian McBride, who was forced to resign as former prime minister Gordon Brown's adviser in 2009 after being linked to a plot to smear Tory MPs on a gossip website, said:

Labour currently has no clear idea who its target audience is, no positive messages to communicate to anyone about why they should vote for the party, no policies which will persuade them, and is being run in a totally dysfunctional way.

– Damian McBride

The former spin doctor urged Labour to acknowledge its mistakes in government and to better communicate a coherent plan for the country.
He wrote:

If Labour currently has central, underlying messages that it is trying to communicate to the electorate about itself, its policies, and its leader, the best you could say at present is that it's not quite coming across.

If the message is 'We're not the Tories or the Lib Dems, and you hate them', that may work up to a point, but it won't do much for those people who would happily express their antipathy by voting for Ukip or just staying at home, let alone those who hate Labour as well.

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The Labour Party is being run in a "totally dysfunctional" way with policies that amount to "a great steaming pile of fudge", according to a former party spin doctor.

In an apparent attack on Ed Miliband's leadership, Damian McBride warned that the party has a problem in communicating positive messages to voters and that its policies either do not stand up to scrutiny or "go unnoticed in the pub".

In an updated version of his memoirs, serialised in the Daily Mail, Mr McBride said Mr Miliband should position himself as an outsider like Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage rather than an establishment politician directed by PR advisers.

I want to apologise and say sorry to Stuart Holmes, who is a passionate campaigner and well known to everyone who attends party conferences and was perfectly entitled to do as he did on Tuesday in trying to get attention for his causes.

It was totally out of character for me to react to him in the way I did.

I also want to apologise for the blogpost I wrote after the incident.

It was full of absurd bravado and in the heat of the moment I behaved in a frankly idiotic way.

In addition, having accepted my guilt, I feel I should make some sort of reparation to Mr Holmes.

I will pay for a new placard for him and also make a donation to a charity of his choice.

Damian McBride said he was "ashamed" of his actions of Gordon Brown's spin doctor. Credit: ITV Daybreak

Former Labour spin doctor Damian McBride has denied his controversial memoirs will damage the election ambitions of Ed Miliband, saying the party leader comes out well in his book Power Trip.

"I don't think this will make any difference to the way people vote at the next election," McBride told ITV's Daybreak, saying Miliband and shadow chancellor Ed Balls were "not involved" in any of his activities while he worked for Gordon Brown.

"I make no excuses for my behaviour and don't expect anyone else to," added McBride, who said he had operated in a political system that was "unacceptable" and "cut-throat".